Lesson of the Blue Wave Primaries? We’re All Struggling Now

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the day after her surprise win in the Democratic primary, went from a long shot to a leader of a new progressive wave of Democratic candidates.CreditCreditAnnie Tritt for The New York Times

On the day that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accomplished her remarkable victory in the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th Congressional District seat, beating Joseph Crowley, the longtime incumbent, a new book arrived, as if by cosmic fiat, to help explain the emerging realignments of the political order.

“Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America” examines the deteriorating fortunes of the middle-class — the teachers who sustain themselves with second jobs as Uber drivers; the young adjunct professors on food stamps; the unemployed 50-year-olds with few prospects; the junior lawyers far from the Wall Street partner track, carrying heavy student debt, whose work is already being automated.

In the book, Alissa Quart illustrates how life in a once-secure stratum has come to resemble the endlessly anxious existence of those in the rungs below. Bolstering the argument, as it happens, is new data from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, released this week, indicating that in three counties in the San Francisco Bay Area, where housing costs are famously astronomical, families earning $117,000 a year would now qualify as low-income, making them eligible for subsidized housing.

If you live in a place where a master’s degree won’t permit you a lifestyle that looks much different from an office clerk’s — if, in fact, it means you moonlight in a cubicle doing something you despise and eating lentils for dinner in the Rubbermaid TakeAlongs you brought from home — it follows that you will be less likely to think of yourself as a member of the privileged elite to which you have been told you belong and more inclined to find affinity with the broadening numbers of the more obviously oppressed, and vote accordingly.

This dynamic played a crucial role in three Democratic primaries in and around the city. In the Second Congressional District, which encompasses parts of Long Island’s South Shore, Liuba Grechen Shirley, a young mother and consultant to nonprofit organizations who has never held political office, easily beat DuWayne Gregory, a county legislator who had the backing of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s specious Women’s Equality Party even though DuWayne Gregory is not female, either by birth or choice.

The women’s party’s support was even more ludicrous given that Ms. Grechen Shirley, after petitioning the Federal Election Commission, used some of her campaign funds to cover child-care costs incurred during the race, a move that signaled just how intimately she understands the economic stresses of raising children even in what would appear to be comfortable circumstance.

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Adem Bunkeddeko, who challenged the establishment candidate Yvette Clarke for a Brooklyn Congressional seat. He lost by roughly 1,000 votes.CreditGabriella Angotti-Jones/The New York Times

The Second District, which includes Levittown, in many ways embodies the lost promises of a mythic suburbia — a devastating opioid crisis, rising property taxes and soaring flood-insurance premiums in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy have made it an increasingly difficult place to live. Ms. Grechen Shirley, who had her own encounters with untenable health care costs after the birth of her two small children, made that issue a focus of her campaign as well. The median income in the area is $100,000, but as she put it, “on Long Island $100,000 doesn’t go very far.” It is with this thrust that she hopes to defeat her Republican opponent, Peter King, an avatar for the Trump administration who has served Long Island in Congress for 25 years, in November.

Both Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s win in a largely minority district that encompasses parts of Queens and the Bronx and Adem Bunkeddeko’s near-victory in the Ninth Congressional District seat in Central Brooklyn, tell us something else: that the narratives we have constructed around gentrification are not as bluntly outlined as we often conjure them. The races, in fact, revealed more about allegiance than division.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive who ran on a platform of free Medicare and college tuition, did well in nearly every part of her district, but she did especially well in Astoria, Queens, where white residents, many of them young and educated and tagged as invaders, make up roughly half the population. As Ms. Ocasio-Cortez pointed out during her campaign, the price of a two-bedroom apartment in her district rose 80 percent during the past three years. The housing crisis is shared broadly enough that a recent Vassar graduate toggling between an internship and two different barista jobs is facing down the same predatory landlord as the longtime Dominican neighbor she is always imagined to be displacing.

Mr. Bunkeddeko, the son of Ugandan immigrants who grew up with his siblings in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, ran to depose the longtime Democrat incumbent Yvette Clarke, whose mother served the district before her and who has passed very little legislation of her own. He ran on a platform centered on housing inequity in a string of neighborhoods that includes Crown Heights, where some of the fiercest gentrification battles in the city are unfolding, and he lost by roughly 1,000 votes.

He did well with older African-American voters, he told me, and young white newcomers in Crown Heights and Prospect Heights; Ms. Clarke, he said, did better with Caribbean voters in neighborhoods with more single-family homes.

Esteban Girón, a tenants’ rights advocate in Crown Heights, told me that a battle over the development of the Bedford-Union Armory in Crown Heights, which was originally planned to contain mostly luxury housing, was led in part by young white members of the Democratic Socialists of America. I asked Mr. Girón what might have brought Mr. Bunkeddeko over the edge, and he said a refusal to take money from real-estate interests who are the real enemy. In effect, Mr. Bunkeddeko was an insurgent who wasn’t quite insurgent enough.

“The housing movement has become increasingly socialist,” Mr. Girón said. “The Democrats are not good for us. Adem could have done it if he could have said at every speech ‘I don’t take corporate money.”’